Every day, several quintillion bytes of data may be created around the world. These data come from everywhere: posts to social media sites, digital pictures and videos, purchase transaction records, bank transactions, sensors used to gather data and intelligence, like weather information, cell phone GPS signal, and many others. This type of data and its vast accumulation is often referred to as “big data.” This vast amount of data eventually is stored and maintained in storage nodes, such as hard disk drives (HDDs), solid-state storage drives (SSDs), or the like, and these may reside on networks or on storage accessible via the Internet, which may be referred to as the “cloud.” In some cases the data is not accessed very frequently but it needs to be available at any time with minimal delay. For example, the data may be write once, read many (WORM) data, such as data posted to social media web sites, or video media posted by users on public video sharing sites.
Conventional storage solutions may not be well suited to this application. Hard disk drives, for example, may consume excessive power if kept spinning, and may take too long to start up if allowed to stop after each data access. Data corruption in solid state drives might be a consequence of very long periods of idle time. This limitation is sometimes referred to as a data retention limitation. Thus, there is a need for a system and method for storing large volumes of infrequently accessed data, providing rapid access, and in a power-efficient manner.